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Webs
Webs is a 1989 psychological horror film directed by Elliot Strange and starring Annette Bening and Beau Bridges. The film centers on a neurotic wife who wants to leave her apathetic husband, but is greeted by a number of nightmarish scenarios before returning to where she left off. Things get worse when she suddenly finds herself in a murder conspiracy and seeks the truth. The film has often been compared to Jacob's Ladder due to its framework, even though this film came out first. Plot Eris Belk (Bening) is a laid off defense attorney who lives with her husband Sandy (Bridges) in Albany. Eris lives in the shadow of her more successful socialite sister Rachel (Lois Chiles) and has faced years of verbal abuse from her father (Burgess Meredith), leading to her leaving Queens for Upstate New York. Eris receives no support from Sandy, and is trapped in a dead-end relationship Eris and Sandy get into a fight after Sandy refuses to do something about a leak on the upper floor (he claims that there's no access to the room above and it'd be too costly to do work on it. At her breaking point, Lois threatens to leave Sandy and lead a life of her own. As she ventures out, she nearly gets hit by a car. She shrugs it off and goes to get something to eat at a burger stand, where a bus rams through the back of the stand and kills her. Eris awakens in bed and the argument plays out again. This time, Eris kicks Sandy out, and he leaves without protest. Eris goes to make herself coffee and finds she's suffering from a nosebleed. Her attempts at capping it lead to more areas bleeding and she eventually succumbs to blood loss. Eris finds herself back in bed, this time a few hours earlier. She shrugs it off as a bad dream and has breakfast, but is distracted by the leak. Unwilling to argue, Eris decides to go for a walk to clear her head, but collapses. She suffers from a severe fever and is put through a painful ice bath to bring it down, but it soon dawns on her that her husband is trying to drown her as he keeps her head submerged. Eris finds herself back in bed and sees Sandy is gone. She is greeted at the door by her neighbor Pierce, who inquires about his missing wife Wilma. Eris quickly says she doesn't know where she is and sends Pierce off. Eris didn't care for Wilma's condescending nature and jokingly wishes she was dead. She decides to take care of the leak, and upon ripping into the ceiling, the bloated corpse of Wilma falls through; she had been drowned to death. Eris receives a phone call from her father, but due to the trauma she faced, prompts him to check up on her. Eris hides the body in her backyard. Sandy returns and confronts her over the ceiling. Eris brings up Wilma and accuses him of killing her. Sandy denies the accusation and assaults Eris into silence before departing. Eris returns home and is shocked to find that Wilma's body had been discovered after a dog dug up the backyard. Eris is pegged as a suspect. She manages to buy some time by making up an alibi. Eris readies for bed but finds herself restrained to a table in a hospital, where she is euthanized by her neighbors. Eris awakens from yet another nightmare and goes to the police. She is aided by private investigator Larry Meeker (Richard Romanus) and receives help from two neighbors, Harold and Martha, who claim to have seen her before Wilma got murdered. All four agree to congregate at their local diner the next morning in the hopes of finding more evidence. Meeker in the meantime invites her to his house to discuss what Eris knows. The conversation quickly turns dark as Meeker asks questions that lead to contradictory answers, leading to Eris incriminating herself and getting hauled away. This turns out to be another nightmare, but Eris awakens to find the body of the dog who found Wilma in her bed. She throws it into a remote lake. Eris is visited by Rachel, but it quickly sours when Rachel wants to use her legal skills to get her out of an assault charge. We learn how Rachel had exploited Eris to get out of trouble with the law, which led to her getting laid off. Angered, Eris kicks her out and threatens her to never return. As Eris readies to meet Meeker, she finds a newspaper claiming she was incarcerated, clued in through a change in testimony from Martha. This is revealed to be another vision as Sandy confronts her, threatening her not to report him. Eris barely gets out of the house as he violently grabs and twists her arm and makes it to the diner. She learns from a waiter there that none of the three ever showed up. Upon returning home, Eris discovers the bodies of all three in the trunk of her car. She disposes the vehicle in the woods beneath a set of fallen trees. Eris returns and finds Sandy's jacket in the living room, she puts it on and talks to herself trying to make sense of what's happening. She soon learns that she was the murderer, this being clued in through apparitions in the form of nightmares and that Sandy was an amalgamate of her contempt and malevolence, which she used as justification for the murders; Eris drowned Wilma a bathtub, ran over the dog and shot Meeker, Harold and Martha. Sandy claims that the only way she could find peace is if she gets rid of the sources of her inner despair, her father and Rachel. Eris' father arrives to confront her, and an argument breaks out, ending with Eris stabbing him in the throat. Rachel arrives and Eris beats her with a fire poker, her father watching helplessly as she dies. A month after the murders, a police officer arrives at Eris' house. He finds her reading in the living room and claims that she is still a prime suspect in the murders, though is confounded by a lack of evidence. Eris shrugs off the threat as the camera pans up to a loft previously unseen, where the bodies of Eris' victims have been cut and are being prepped for consumption. Cast * Annette Bening: Eris Belk * Beau Bridges: Sandy * Burgess Meredith: Mr. Belk * Lois Chiles: Rachel Belk * Richard Romanus: Larry Meeker * Max Gail: Harold * Roxanne Hart: Martha * I.M. Hobson: Lex * James Hong: Park * Elizabeth Peña: Wilma * Howard Dayton: Pierce * J.T. Walsh: Officer * Tim Choate: Waiter Category:Gecko Studios films Category:Films